Volumes of material come into television, radio, and news production facilities today. In any of these production facilities, finding a desired piece of information from an information source such as a news broadcast typically includes a broad range of manual functions. For example, some of the tasks associated with a television production include locating specific footage, researching archives, identifying relevant segments from live feeds, logging, formatting for multiple interactive standards and delivering to multiple devices. In a previous used technology, personnel manually generated software tags for the content with descriptors about the audio/video data in order to search through and find a desired piece of information in the volumes of material. Journalists, interns or researchers viewed hours of tape manually searching and analyzing through the recorded information to find the exact segment or piece of knowledge that the person was seeking. The same burdensome task typically applies to most unstructured pieces of information including radio broadcasts, newspaper articles, World Wide Web sources etc.
Audio-visual data may come from a variety of sources such as satellite broadcasts, Web broadcasts, Television broadcasts, etc. The audio-visual information from these sources is typically too costly to reuse because the audio and video signals are out of synchronization. Even though both sources of information originally came from the same source, once separated few ways exist to synchronize the signals except repeated attempts to manually synchronize both sources of information. Even if the audio and video data have been encoded, the index for the audio stream and the index for the video data must be manually correlated to attempt to synchronize both sets of data. Manual synchronizing the audio and video data is typically time consuming and expensive. Further, even without the signals being separated, repeated attempts are typically made to manually queue up the start and end video frame from a video clip. The queing up task may be laborious.
Ideally, today's Interactive TV may rapidly respond to a user queries as well as provide extra value added services, such as automatically provide links to relevant material to supplement the subject matter being broadcast on the interactive TV. Currently, costly manual production and preparation must be performed to allow Interactive TV to provide such amenities.